Acura's Katherine Legge Breaks Down the Challenges of Pikes Peak

Car and Driver

8 hours ago

Katherine Legge has raced just about everything on four wheels. She's driven IndyCars at over 230 mph at the Indy 500, drafted in a pack of NASCARs, and driven through the night in endurance races, including piloting the radical DeltaWing. But the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb, which she entered for the first time last year and returned to this year with Acura, is a challenge unlike any she had faced before. We spoke with Legge after her run up the 14,115-foot mountain at this year's Race to the Clouds and learned about the preparations needed and the obstacles she faced at one of the most unique motorsports events in the world.
Legge has yearned to race up Pikes Peak, among the tallest mountains in the United States, since she first came to the country around 20 years ago. But the hill climb—the second-longest-running motorsports event in the U.S. after the Indy 500—remained a distant dream for many years, her busy racing schedule clashing with the event's June date. But when her summer opened up last year, "it kind of fell into my lap," she said. Legge has a long relationship with Acura and Honda Racing Corporation (HRC, formerly known as HPD). "They gave me the opportunity, and so I said, yes, please, I'll do it."
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She quickly discovered that preparing for Pikes Peak is unlike most other races. While IndyCar drivers practice for the Indy 500 with state-of-the-art simulators—such as Honda's "Driver in the Loop" sim that we got to try out last year—there isn't an equivalent resource to mimic driving up the mountain. "I learned it old school," Legge explained. "I watched video over and over again, rewinding and going again for hours."
The 12.42-mile track winds its way up Pikes Peak, with more than 150 turns that include twisting esses and abrupt hairpins, making it difficult to memorize. Legge compared it to the notorious Nürburgring Nordschleife, Germany's 12.94-mile behemoth nicknamed "The Green Hell." She had learned that track virtually and employed the same approach here. "I've watched days' worth of video," Legge said, using footage to pick out crucial reference points.
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Most permanent racetracks have numbered boards showing how far you are from the corner and other landmarks like flag stands, but Pikes Peak's geography and temporary status as a racetrack meant Legge had to use more unorthodox ways to find her braking points and racing lines. She pointed to snow stakes that mark the edge of the road, different types of barriers, and giant boulders that dot the mountainside. She even looks to the temporary bathrooms strewn across the mountain for spectators and race officials. "I'm like, 'okay, I've got to hug the mountain after the portaloo,'" she said, describing her thinking as she blasts up the mountain.
One thing that makes learning the mountain easier is that drivers practice in stages. During the week prior to the race, drivers embark on several practice sessions with the mountain split into three parts. They run each section multiple times during practice, and parcelling it out into three portions makes it easier to remember. "But at no point in time do you ever put it together until race day," Legge explained. "So I have only ever done the whole thing once."
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Legge also relied on advice from her racing friends as well as slower drives up the mountain in road cars, a track walk of sorts. But a drive up the mountain—whether in the Integra Type S road car she took last year or the Acura ADX SUV she used this year—can't compare to the feeling of driving a race car at speed. And that points to one of the other big obstacles, getting seat time in the race car.
Legge scaled the mountain in an Acura Integra Type S DE5, a race car featuring a 360-hp turbocharged 2.0-liter four-cylinder engine hooked up to a sequential gearbox that feeds the front wheels. Her only time behind the wheel, aside from a single test at High Plains Raceway last year and a brief shakedown this year, is during the event itself.
The minimal seat time was especially noteworthy for Legge because of the Integra's front-wheel-drive setup. Nearly all of her racing experience has been in rear-wheel-drive cars, like IndyCars and the Acura NSX GT3. "But I feel like I've driven everything [under] the sun," she said. "I've driven electric cars, I've driven the DeltaWing. I do feel like my ability to switch between cars, series, and the diverse number of things that I've driven helped." Legge clearly learned quickly, with her rookie attempt in 2024 just a few seconds off the front-wheel-drive record, which was set by a car with 140 more horsepower. "At the end of the day, it's just a race car," she said. "You drive it differently, but almost subconsciously, you know what the car needs."
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Pikes Peak's sky-high summit is another hurdle. After all, 14,110 feet above sea level is unbelievably high, and even the race's starting point of 4720 feet is a significant elevation. Altitude sickness affects many tourists who visit the mountain, the thin air making it easy to feel out of breath. "We went up to the top of the mountain when we first got here last year, just to see how it would be. Like, am I going to get sick?" Legge said. "But I was fine with it, and I did a bunch of training between the testing and the race, hiking and running in the altitude." This year, Legge also kept her body acclimated by flying to Mexico City—which has an elevation of over 7000 feet—to race in NASCAR between the test and the hill climb.
While Legge adjusted easily to the elevation, the cars were also affected. As they enter the thin air near the top of the mountain, their engines struggle to make as much power as they did down below. Temperatures also change dramatically over the course of the run, and every practice session happens early in the morning when it's still cold, since the mountain remains open to tourists during normal hours. This means practice isn't exactly representative of race-day conditions.
"Tire pressures, the engine, they don't perform as well in the heat," she noted. "The only time you go all the way up, you really feel the difference from when the tires are fresh and the engine is good at the bottom to when it's gasping for air at the top. It's super greasy and super boggy." Luckily, every driver but those piloting EVs has to contend with those conditions.
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Sadly, Legge's attempt to break the front-wheel-drive record this year was quashed when high winds at the summit led the race organizers to limit the track to the first two sectors. "I'm disappointed because I think we could have annihilated the front-wheel-drive record," Legge said. "We were like five and a half, six seconds up, halfway up, so it would have been like 10, 15 seconds in the good by the time we got to the top."
Still, she is motivated by her pace in the shortened dash up the mountain. "It's a testament to how well Acura and HRC have done working over the last year to get it to lose less power on the way up, get the tires better, get the car performing better over the bumps," she explained.
While the puzzle pieces for next year are yet to fall into place, Legge is still eyeing that record. "It's never nice to have unfinished business," she said. "But that's the nature of the mountain and racing. My luck will change soon, I'm sure."
Caleb Miller
Associate News Editor
Caleb Miller began blogging about cars at 13 years old, and he realized his dream of writing for a car magazine after graduating from Carnegie Mellon University and joining the Car and Driver team. He loves quirky and obscure autos, aiming to one day own something bizarre like a Nissan S-Cargo, and is an avid motorsports fan.